Stopping Oil and Gas Drilling

An oil drilling platform in Alaska's Cook Inlet. Opening up the fragile, irreplaceable Arctic Ocean to risky drilling for dirty oil will only exacerbate climate change already wreaking havoc on the Arctic and elsewhere.

The Arctic

Earthjustice is working to save the Arctic—and all who rely on it—from the twin threats of oil and gas development and catastrophic climate change.

Ominous signs abound in the Arctic as climate change bears down. Dwindling sea ice makes it harder for polar bears to search for food and shelter, for example, but easier for Royal Dutch Shell and other petroleum giants to search for oil. Shell’s plans to explore and drill for oil in sensitive Arctic waters is in and of itself a significant threat to imperiled wildlife, including the endangered bowhead whale—a culturally and ecologically critical species to the local Inupiat.

Those plans also threaten to poison Arctic waters and the wildlife within with a catastrophic oil spill, an event that no oil company is able to clean up. The industry demonstrated its incompetence in the Gulf, where conditions are warm and calm. Cleaning up a similar disaster in the Arctic—where conditions are icy and dark and where the waves crest at 20 feet—is inconceivable.

Shell’s shoreline protection strategies in the event of an oil spill are based on the assumption that the company will clean up more than 90 percent of any spilled oil. Even in relatively favorable environmental conditions, less than 10 percent of spilled oil was recovered after the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez spills.

Challenging specific lease sales in the Chukchi Sea. In February 2008, despite huge gaps in basic scientific information about the region, a lack of an adequate spill cleanup plan, and warnings from government scientists, the Bush Interior Department offered 30 million acres of this sensitive Arctic ecosystem for oil and gas leasing, an important first step in committing an area to oil and gas development.

Fighting for enforceable regulations that govern the use of chemical oil dispersants—widely and recklessly used after the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Shell’s Arctic oil spill response plans include the use of chemical dispersants.

The lowest amounts of Arctic sea ice on record since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all been recorded during the last six years. It’s possible to slow the pace of warming and melting in the Arctic in the near term by reducing emissions of soot and smog, which would have fast climate benefits.

Watch a film about the thriving, diverse Arctic landscape, and the threats the region faces from industrialization and climate change. Produced by the acclaimed photographers Florian Schulz and Emil Herrera-Schulz.